A Year in Reading: Eimear McBride

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My great, if severely belated, discovery this year was the New Zealand writer Keri Hulme’sThe Bone People — it was first published in 1985 and won the Booker Prize that same year, so I’m very behind! I was immediately snared by the rich, uncompromising language that flips effortlessly between New Zealand slang, untranslated phrases in Maori, and deeply poetic high-art prose. But it is the story itself — a perverse kind of love story between a burnt-out, asexual artist, a well-intentioned but physically abusive widower, and the mysterious, mute boy he has adopted — that makes The Bone People one of the most ethically challenging and emotionally complex books I have ever read. The occasional foray into vaguely New Age spirituality notwithstanding, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who is interested in literature that refuses to trade in the market of easy answers.

One of my year’s other reading pleasures was provided by Jenny Offill’sDept. of Speculation — another book with no time for the comfort of cliché. While much of the book is a wonderfully unforgiving portrait of marital crisis, what interested me particularly was her examination of the female experience of work — and specifically of writing — after parenthood, along with the unwillingness of our culture to confront or even acknowledge the complexity of this experience.

Eimear McBride
is an Irish novelist. Her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, has won several awards, including the Goldsmiths Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

The first book I remember reading this year was an advance copy of Maggie Nelson’sThe Argonauts, handed to me by my friend Amanda. I had a six-month-old baby, and Amanda and I had both, coincidentally, just moved from New York to Portland. I am sure I’d read things in the first six months of my son’s life, but I don’t remember any of them. I think mostly I tweeted and Googled paranoid things late at night. She pressed this book to me and I read it on a car ride out to the Oregon coast, baby napping in his car seat. At first it made me mad, all the theory getting in the way of what I really wanted, THE LIFE OF MAGGIE. She is one of those people for me, writers who I want to cross all boundaries with, writers from whom I ask too much. She makes me want more than, as a reader, I deserve. She already gives us more than we deserve. It isn’t fair. I read about how she put a laminated copy of her Guggenheim fellowship announcement (given to her by her mother) under her son’s high chair to catch everything he tossed, and my heart soared. I got used to the theory, came to love it. I read the book a few times over. Then I read Bluets again. Then I ordered The Art of Cruelty, and was told we already owned a copy. Actually I put it on the stoop before we left New York. It was a galley, I rationalized. But really, that book makes me mad. It’s hard to get into and it isn’t Bluets — this is how unfair I am to Maggie. I always call her Maggie in my mind. Anyway, in my newly regained readerly flush I paid for this book and it’s still on my nightstand. I haven’t been able to get through the first few pages. I am an apostate, I know it. Still, though, I think of this as the year of Maggie Nelson, for the world and, more specifically, for me. She brought me back into loving reading.

I read Sarah Manguso’sOngoingness soon after, the Graywolf one-two punch of 2015, but it just made me want to reread Manguso’s book The Two Kinds of Decay, which is such a mean thing to say, I know. Anyway I did reread it, in the mornings before settling into writing for a few weeks. Reading someone else’s book during the work day feels like the ultimate indulgence to me. It makes me anxious, but then the words, the voice, the confidence (if it’s the right book) soothe it, too. I’m not sure it serves as anything more than a more virtuous, exciting way to procrastinate. Even still: Grace Paley, Nora Ephron, Manguso, they all put the voice back in my head, helped settle the whirling panic and reform it into something more confident and at ease. I felt like they were the band playing me in.

When a certain ferocity was needed, I listened to Sylvia Plath read her own work on Spotify. Afterward, I started reading parts of her journal. Her mundane anxiety about publishing her work, applying to residencies, and walking to the mailbox looking for checks is what made me put it down. Not today, Sylvia. Not today. Same goes for Adrienne Rich’sOf Woman Born. And Paula Bomer’sBaby & Other Stories. I recommend these in a certain state of mind, when you can handle them. It’s important to know when you can’t. This is a skill I’ve yet to master.

If it was the year of Maggie Nelson, for me, it was also the year of Heidi Julavits. She’s “Heidi J” to me and my writer-reader friends, because we refer to her constantly. Her book The Folded Clock came out in earlyish spring and this book and iced coffee were about all I saw on Instagram, and all I cared to see. At first I thought it was the Leanne Shapton cover, but it goes deeper. It’s a book that seems effortless, which means it was brilliantly engineered. The kind of book that makes you happy to have to wait somewhere, because you have it in your totebag; happy to go to bed early so you can sit up reading it. I saw Heidi J read one night at Powell’s and my friend and I left immediately to get a drink. She was so funny, so charming, so effortlessly beautiful (like her writing!), we sat in the car sighing. “Her kids are older right?” Right. She makes me excited to be a decade older, to be more settled into life, to work my ass off and to know myself. This, and the hidden work of the book, is its power.

On the occasion of Vivian Gornick’sThe Odd Woman and the City being published, and a friend texting me photos of random pages of Gornick’s backlist, I said, Fine, and ordered a bunch of her books from Powell’s. I’d read her best book, Fierce Attachments on a road trip a few years ago; I was 30 weeks pregnant and the bookstore owner confessed she was pregnant, too. When she sighed and proclaimed her love for the book as she rung up my purchase, I knew it was brought to me by fate. We became friends and I sent her a box full of baby clothes. I read the rest of Gornick’s books this year like they were the key to something, though none of them touches Fierce Attachments. The End of The Novel of Love felt a lot like a brilliant incisive woman writing on Tumblr, full of the sort of projection and assumption and familiarity that is absent from more traditional criticism. In other words, I loved it. The Situation and the Story was that kind of clarifying reading experience where the clarity might be a delusion but at least you have the confidence, the reassurance, of clarity. Months later I couldn’t tell you what I took from The Situation and The Story aside from that mental cheering and gratitude for a book coming into your life at the exact right time you think you need it (for me, I was finishing a nonfiction book proposal). The Odd Woman And The City itself seemed sharp and funny and a little sad. Did it ever really cohere? Transcend? I’m not sure, but I am grateful to have spent time inside her head.

After that, propelled forward by fate, the final Neapolitan novel from Elena Ferrante was coming out, so I finally GAVE IN and bought the first two books, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name. My initial reaction was something like, “What is this shit, enough with these dolls!” But then I got sucked into what was one of the most satisfying reading experiences of my life. I finished these books in the course of a few days, stopping only to drive to the bookstore one late afternoon, cursing myself for not buying all of them at once. When I finished all four I was bereft. I was mad at Ferrante. I thought she screwed up the ending. Really, I was mad it was over.

I didn’t read anything for awhile, or nothing memorable. How do you follow Ferrante? After a few weeks of false starts and Googling furiously to try and figure out Ferrante’s secret identity, I found my cure: Barbara Comyns. I knew of her from an Emily Books pick: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, brilliantly reissued by The Dorothy Project, and still unread by me. I have learned in my time as a reader that the writers Emily Books publishes will always be the ones people come to be obsessed with, even if it takes, regrettably, a few years. Elena Ferrante! Eve Babitz! Ellen Willis. Eileen Myles. Those are just the people whose names start with E, for fuck’s sake. Renata Adler! Nell Zink! I could go on. Resistance is foolish.

All this to say Barbara Comyns’s Our Spoons Came From Woolworths got me out of my own head and onto the couch for three hours, reading this in one setting after my son went to bed. Her voice is sui generis and I goddamn love her. She reminded me of a thing that Emily Gould — who along with Ruth Curry started Emily Books, and who also not coincidentally wrote the introduction to the edition of the book I was reading — told me once when I was having a crisis of confidence. Okay, a crisis of jealousy. She said something like, with regard to writing, it’s useless to be jealous because, “No one can ever be better than you are at being you.” No one else can be better than Comyns is at being Comyns, that is no one can write like Comyns, so I ordered her book The Vet’s Daughter and inhaled that one, too. I need more.

As the year comes to an end, this is all I want, to read books that aren’t the key to anything except themselves. Mary Gaitskill’sThe Mare made me sad and anxious. I am waiting for David Copperfield to come in the mail.

David Heatley is a cartoonist and musician living in Queens, NY. His work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, in The New York Times, and in numerous anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Kramer’s Ergot and Best American Comics. His graphic memoir My Brain is Hanging Upside Down from Pantheon Books is available now from Pantheon and Jonathan Cape. A 6-song mini-LP soundtrack to the book, produced by Grammy award-winner Peter Wade is available on iTunes. More info at davidheatley.com.Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I read Brothers throughout last year while reading mostly non-fiction books. It’s become one of my favorite novel of all time, tied for now with Anna Karenina. These books knock my socks off. Maybe it’s the Christian thing I’m drawn to. Both Doestoevsky and Tolstoy believe that every character is worthy of loving attention, generous description and true understanding. It’s refreshing in an age of hate and fear politics, and in a culture full of genre heroes and villains. I also just love the form of these classic Russian novels. I can’t seem to read any contemporary fiction lately. I’m allergic to all those adjectives. I feel smothered by the language. But Tolstoy and Doestevsky, with their short chapters made for serializing in a newspaper, their unabashed moral center, their razor sharp insight into human emotion, their gripping tabloid-worthy dramas, that’s the stuff for me.Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert & A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I’m really into mass culture and have been since I was a little kid. In my teens and early twenties I tried to make myself forget that I love big, dumb, flashy, optimistic American music and art. I tried to convince myself I liked sad, depressive, nihilistic fringe art. The more difficult and narrow the better. But in the last few years, I started to remember what I really love. I hope I don’t forget again. It blows my mind that these two books could have such a huge place in pop culture. Gilbert’s book was the best page-turner I’ve read in years, but it was talking about indelible spiritual matters, like selfless service, unconditional love, prayer and meditation. How did she pull that off? I don’t have a lot of words for what Tolle’s books mean to me. His work has been nothing short of life-altering. He’s given me a clear direction towards which to grow. I need voices like his, speaking to the part of me that resides deeper than the incessant chatter in my head or the surface layer of communication which passes for intimacy in most of my relationships.New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama. Published by Brooklyn-based Picture Box (arguably the most exciting comics publisher in operation today), this first book by Japanese cartoonist Yuichi Yokoyama is a revelation. Yokoyama has worked in relative obscurity for most of his career. He seems to regard himself as primarily a conceptual artist who happens to make comic books, citing Sol LeWitt as a primary influence. From reading the interview at the back of the book, I gleaned that his stated purpose is to make stories devoid of emotion or personality. I think that’s impossible, since I believe everything is either conscious or unconscious autobiography. But the product of this experiment of his is utterly fascinating. What appears to be a chase scene straight out of a manga book, complete with samurai swords drawn, quickly becomes a meditation on physical objects and space. The man running from the pursuers winds up in a library and begins hurling books to defend himself. What follows is panel after panel of books being sliced, pages falling through the air in graceful arcs. He seems to explore every permutation of what form a falling, shredded book might take. At the end of the story, the last page floats to the floor and the chase continues off the page. What exactly did we just witness? Who was the protagonist? The books? Other stories are just a series of silent panels showing things being built: rocks crushed, astroturf rolled out, canals dug, water poured. No human interaction with the environment until the last page. Suddenly, characters wearing bizarre, other-worldly costumes celebrate their accomplishment with ridiculously flat dialogue as the fluorescent lights are flicked on. There are no traditional story arcs to any of these works. These stories, despite themselves, are very funny and still work on me at an emotional level. What’s so exciting is that I can’t quite identify what the emotion is or begin to articulate it.Paul Goes Fishing by Michael Rabagliati. Michael Rabagliati is a wonderful cartoonist from Canada who has been publishing his series of “Paul” books with Drawn and Quarterly over the last decade. This latest one is also his best. The artwork, which has always been soothing, consistent and classic without resorting to nostalgia, has been dialed up a notch. His renderings of campsites surrounded by trees, reflective surfaces of lakes, the musty cabins themselves are nothing short of masterful. His work has achieved a perfect balance between realistic detail and cartoon abstraction, which leaves enough room for the reader to inhabit the space and make it his own. The story itself is a complete surprise. It starts off as a pitch perfect ode to the period just following marriage but before parenthood. He captures the friendship and almost brother-sister bond of the newlyweds, complete with in-jokes, teasing, and sweet affection. He also renders perfectly the passage of time on vacation: languid blissful days on a boat, long conversations between friends, the curious and sometimes mischievous games children invent, and the maddeningly long days spent indoors, searching for a relief from boredom during a thunderstorm. There’s little in the way of dramatic emotion, lust or sex here, which is rare but welcome in an “adult” comic book. Slowly it begins to dawn on us that the couple are in fact getting ready to have their own baby. Tragically, the trip is cut short as the couple faces the first in a series of miscarriages. We are shown the horrible details of the D&C procedure. It is shocking to be here after spending more than half of the book in the idyllic woods. Only a page or two are devoted to Paul’s attempt at praying, but it’s enough and it’s terribly moving. By the third time, the pregnancy is a success and we feel all the relief and joy that the author must have at the arrival of his own baby. Rabagliati ends the book with Paul’s trip to the church to give thanks in case it really was his prayer that made the difference. I hope more people spread the word about this heartfelt, understated and rich book. I know I’ll be reading it several more times and studying all its wonderful contours and complexities.More from A Year in Reading 2008

The best book I read this year was Brian Hart’sThe Bully of Order. It is a dense, brilliant book, and — I don’t say this lightly — I suspect it will be seen as Hart’s first real contribution to the canon.

Hart owes Cormac McCarthy in the same way that Cormac McCarthy owes William Faulkner. He’s that good. So — why haven’t you heard of him?

Well, you won’t see him at parties, because he doesn’t drink anymore and even when he did he was always the guy standing in the corner. He’s not on Facebook or Twitter, and, as far as I know, he’s never set foot in New York City (let alone Brooklyn) — even Austin was a little too high speed for him. Where Hart is most comfortable is the only place that ought to matter, which is on the page.

I’ve been lucky to come up with some talented people — Kevin Powers and Smith Henderson in fiction, Miriam Greenberg and Roger Reeves in poetry — but Hart is one who ought to be mentioned in that group and isn’t. Bully of Order is not always an easy book, but it’s brilliant, and Hart is an incredible writer who will likely go down as one of the greats.